Re: Classification of the APSL as non-DFSG-compliant
On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 01:14:15PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 4/20/20 12:32 PM, Tobias Frost wrote:
> >> Any commercial product using GPL-2 must share the source code publicly, the
> >> same applies to the APSL-1.2. There is no difference.
> >
> > No. the GPL requires you only to give the sources to the recipient of the work,
> > not to everyone which is the defintiopn of "publicily" [1].
>
> I don't see any difference from a distribution point of view. Apple's APSL
> is even less restrictive than the GPL-2 here as it does not require you
> to share your modifications among your friends or for R&D. The GPL-2
> requires that, the APSL not.
That is not the point. Excess distribution is the problem. I have to offer the
code to people I have not interacted with.
(And the license does not say anything about friends, just about RD departements)
> Furthermore, the question that is relevant for the dissident test - that
> was used as argument for calling the license non-free - is whether sharing
> your modifications with your friends would require you to make these
> modifications public. And that is clearly not the case.
As said, IMHO, distributing to the friend of a dissident is considered as Deployment.
> And, devdisk_cmds (which is what hfsprogs is derived from) is part of the
> Fedora main distribution [1]. So RedHat's lawyers seem to agree that the
> license can be considered free. It's not distributed in openSUSE for the
> moment, but as a SUSE employee, I should be able to ask our lawyers.
>
> In any case, I will be contacting Apple now and I will ask for their assessment
> as I don't think we're getting further in this discussion if the goal posts
> keep moving.
You should contact ftp masters. their opinion is authorative in Debian.
Not that of Fedora, Red Hat and not that of Apple.
But maybe Apple is willing to relicnese it to Apache 2.0, then it would be
worth a try. (ASFAIK they did so with some projets having this license)
> Thanks,
> Adrian
>
> > [1] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/hfsplus-tools/
>
> --
> .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> : :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
> `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
> `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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